CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I DIDN’T KNOW if anybody else could see him, and he certainly wasn’t looking at anyone but me, not even Mom when she appeared at the top of the shaky staircase, afraid to come down but more worried about me. “Tessa, are you all right?”
“Sort of.” I looked at the ghost. He wasn’t all white and misty but himself, although one dimensional and sepia colored, as though there had been colors to him once but something had leached them all out before flattening him. He looked almost like a vintage photograph back in the early days, one of those tintype thingies. When he realized I saw him, he gave a weary and crooked smile and lifted a hand.
I lifted a hand back.
“We thought the house was haunted. It was you, all this time. All the rattles and pots and pans.”
He inclined his head.
Mom came down a shaky step or two. “What is it? Who are you talking to?”
She knew something happened to me before anyone else did. The men around me stood stock still, but she fairly quivered with anticipation and worry. But then, she was my mom. I craned my head around to tell her.
“I can see him. They can’t.”
She didn’t ask who. She put shaking fingers to her mouth instead. “Is he . . . Is he . . .”
“Dead? I don’t know. Are you?”
Mom took another slow step down. “John?”
He glanced at her, and then away quickly, as if the sight of her burned him. He stared at the floor a moment. I saw his lips move long before the words reached me. “I don’t think so. But I can’t really tell. I’ve been trying to let you know I’m here somewhere.”
She didn’t react but I stepped back with a gasp.
“What is it?”
“I can hear him.” I whirled around to face her. “You didn’t hear that?”
She shook her head, blonde curls tumbling about her shoulders. “Not a thing.”
“He answered you. And I heard him.”
Steptoe drew himself up. “It’s the stone. We can’t perceive wot she does. Well, perhaps Hiram did, slightly. But she’s on ’er own.”
Brian put his hand on my arm. “Tell me, us, what’s happening?”
“The room got all wonky, but that might have been shock. Then it filled with sparkles and kind of dimmed. Hazy-like. And then I saw my father, only it’s not, he’s not quite real. He’s near transparent.”
My father’s lips moved again and a few seconds later, I got the sense of what he said. “Tell the professor I still have it.”
“And he says to tell you he still has it.”
“Does he now? Well, that’s good, that’s good.” Brian frowned. “If I could only think of what it might have been.”
That caught my father’s full attention. He moved, wavering a bit, as if walking across the bottom of a swimming pool. “What happened to the old man?”
“It’s a long story,” I returned. “If you’re sticking around this time, I might be able to tell you.” My throat stung. I wanted to hug him and cry and then get mad all over again, then hug him again. I had missed him. I had.
My mother whispered, “How does he look?” as if afraid to draw attention.
I shrugged at Mom. “Not like Casper the Ghost or anything. It’s . . . strange. Like an old-timey picture. And his words come across slowly, out of synch.”
“Aha!” Brian jumped a step. “It might be, of course I can’t be certain, and it’s rare, but it can happen. He’s caught between dimensions. How on earth he managed that, I’ve no idea.”
“Then he’s not dead?”
“No, not yet.” Brian scratched the side of his jaw. “He’ll eventually fade away though to the other side if we can’t draw him back. I have to remember . . .”
“Is he carrying a relic you need?”
After a long, thoughtful moment, Brian shook his head. “I don’t believe so. An item of great importance. I remember being very distressed when he disappeared with it, but just what it is . . .” He sighed. “I can’t bring it to mind.”
My father said, “I never opened the box. I have no idea what it is, either.” His form rippled suddenly, winked out, and came back. He held shaking hands out to me. “What’s happening?”
“I have no idea!” I cried to the others, “He’s winking in and out. Are we losing him?” Not again. Not yet. I wasn’t ready. I know Mom wasn’t.
Both Brian and Steptoe said as one, “Not good.”
Steptoe added, “He’s weakening. It’s willpower that keeps him on the edge of this reality. But it draws on him, it has to.”
I grabbed for him before he could wink away totally. The stone in my hand went ice-hot and as I touched him, I felt him, the cloth of his shirt’s sleeve, the slightness of his shoulder, the smell of his old-fashioned after-shave, the warmth of his body.
Everyone else in the room gasped as they saw him. Just for a moment. Just for a flash. Then my stone cooled and he faded back to his sepia self and I let go.
I didn’t know how he got to where he was, but I knew that my stone might have the power to bring him back if we’d all seen him. Somehow, I’d brought him in line with us, just for that brief moment. So it gave me the power for that, among other uses. Would that be a dark thing to do? Would I be upsetting the worlds between here and wherever there was? Life and death?
I suddenly didn’t care.
“I’ll get you back, Dad. I will.”
The stone flared again and as I held my hand out, palm up, to look at it, a tiny flame danced over the surface, and then the marble absorbed it. I could feel a coldness go through my body.
“Ah, no, ducks, you shouldn’t have done that. Never make a vow with a maelstrom stone.”
I’d meant to do what I did, but a mantle of fear tried to settle over my shoulders, and I shook it off impatiently. “Too late now.”
“Too right that is.” Steptoe sighed again.
We left him there, in the basement. I tried to coax him upstairs with me, but it seemed he couldn’t cross the boundary. He had used all his energy strength over the past many months poltergeisting. He might cross later, Brian told me, if he gained it back.
Brian and Steptoe fastened a kind of rope hoist, a block and tackle, to get Hiram up the stairs, at his instruction, and it worked, more or less. The first thing he did was get his phone out and notify the family that he needed a small construction crew, and then he told us that he would get repairs and remodels done punctually. They’d arrive in a day or two. After that, we ordered pizzas.
I wouldn’t let anyone slide the pantry back into place. I wanted to be able to pop down and talk to him if I needed to, or if he needed me. Mom didn’t say much, but she cried quietly and clung to my right hand, the one without the maelstrom stone.
She, the pert and blonde one, cried enough that her nose finally turned red and her eyes looked a little bloodshot. I sat down with her, side-by-side on the couch, our bodies close from ankle to shoulder, and realized how much I’d grown to look like my father in the last two years. Tall, lanky, thick tangle of hair. I couldn’t remember if he had freckles too. I must remind her of him every single day, and I’d had no real idea. I’d been thinking of myself, mostly.
And I decided that I’d become as much of an adrenaline junkie as he was, searching for that surge of excitement, only I didn’t gamble for it. I played with magic.
I put my head back and waited for the doorbell to announce the delivery guy. I listened to three men who’d been absolute strangers just days ago, argue about what to do with my life. I wanted to object but suddenly felt too exhausted to join in.
I barely heard the last sentence: “I still don’t see how it could have bonded so strongly with her.”
A quiet fell among the three as they contemplated the meaning of that.
After many long moments, I lifted my chin. “I bled on it.”
“You what?”
“I’d cut my finger trying to get the pantry seam open, and I bled on it. Or on something on the cabinet shelves when I reached in.” Of course, I’d bled on it later too, when it dug itself in, but that didn’t seem quite as significant. It was almost as if I’d baited it, and it had responded.
Brian’s mouth fell open. He snapped it shut. “That is not good at all.”
“What does it matter?” I pushed away from my mother. “It’s done. Now all we have to worry about is undoing it.”
“No. What we have to do is make certain you stay strong enough to control it. Its bond with you will be that much more formidable. Because it is, it will take considerable effort to undo anything regarding the stone.”
“What do you mean, strong?” My mother’s voice took an edge.
“The stone has a mind of its own, in many ways. Although it looks like a static object, it can tap into other things.” Steptoe took the folded pamphlet out of his suit coat. “Give me a few hours to peruse this and I might be able t’ tell the lot of you more. If the stone embodies anything, it certainly does chaos.” He rattled a page as he opened it and the first sound out of his mouth was an “Uh-oh,” which didn’t give me much confidence.
The door knocker sounded. I stumbled to my feet, grabbed the wallet Mom tossed to me, and went to retrieve the pizzas. She couldn’t foot the bill for five pizzas (Hiram alone would eat two full ones and maybe a slice or two more), so I still carried Morty’s black credit card, but she insisted on leaving the tip. I opened our door to a frazzled looking Carter Phillips.
His mouth twisted and so did that off-center cleft scar. “Someone reported screams and a crash. Or maybe it was a crash and then screams.”
I quickly closed my left hand so I couldn’t flash him the maelstrom stone. I had the sudden thought that the Society would be less than thrilled. “We—ah—well, that would be us, because Hiram fell through the floor in the mudroom and Mom and I let out a yell. It was very traumatic at the time, but everyone’s okay.”
“He fell through the floor?”
“It’s an old house. There’s a basement we didn’t know about. And, you know, Iron Dwarves are weighty.”
“Wow.” He managed to look impressed despite being tired.
“Tessa, is that someone you’re going to let in or do we need to come help you throw him out?” Mom called from the living room.
“It’s Carter Phillips.”
“Oh. Then do let him in. There’s pizza, when it gets here.”
Carter followed me to the living room and dropped in a wing chair. “That sounds good.”
“What flavor?”
He gave a diffident gesture. “Any. All.”
“That’s my man.” Hiram smiled widely at him.
Everyone lapsed into silence. I stayed on my feet and decided to pull paper plates and napkins out of the kitchen in preparation. Stumbling a bit, I kicked a lower cabinet and made the pot on the stove rattle ever so slightly. That pulled me into a dead stop.
Yes, my father had been trying to alert us. Yes, we hadn’t understood for months and months. But none of that explained the absolutely berserk rattles and crashes and clanking when Joanna was here, and I’d forgotten to ask him.
I dropped my pile of paper goodies on the kitchen table. Making sure no one saw me from the living room, I crept to the hole in the mudroom, lay down, and hung my head in, upside down.
We’d taken out two of the bulbs to reduce the lighting from a brilliant glare to muted, and it looked even dimmer through my inverted vision. Not the rest of the house, just here. Wherever it was my dad occupied.
“Dad!” I pitched my whisper sharply. If he lived in a dimension that was darker, who knew how well sound projected?
A waver, like a mirage, rippled below me. His head and shoulders appeared. Nothing else. I swallowed tightly, wondering if our meeting had drained him of valuable and necessary energy. I couldn’t back out now.
“I forgot to ask you, but . . . well, you got really noisy when I had a friend come over the other day.”
“A friend? Who? And when?”
“Joanna Hashimoto. She goes to college with me and Evelyn.”
“Statler’s daughter? Her, I remember. You’re friends now? She used to shun you in middle school. Hashimoto. That would be Hironori Hashimoto? Businessman, important, getting political, country club? Statler surprises me though.”
“More friends than not, now.” I calculated and told him exactly when the two had come over, for the dress try-on. He frowned and I realized that time quite possibly didn’t pass for him as it did for us.
Then he scowled. “I remember now. You have to stay away from her, Tessa!”
His voice thundered in my ears and I drew back a little, thinking that slim, quiet Joanna looked far from dangerous compared to her ninja drivers. I thought a moment before saying, “After what we’ve been through, I think I deserve more than a heated warning. Like some evidence.”
He rippled. The anger had cost him. “I’m in a place of darkness, where the light only reaches a little, and all I can tell you is that the darkness appreciates him. Her. Reaches for them. Don’t let it come for you, too.”
I licked lips suddenly gone dry but the doorbell rang, and blood had gone to my ears making them buzz, and I knew from the sight of him that our conversation had finished, for now.
“All right. I’ve got to go.”
I went and gathered the pizzas and made the delivery boy very happy with his tip.
Everyone else devoured the pizzas as though they were the most important things on earth at the moment, and I guess they must have been. I picked a little at mine and wondered if I should confide in Carter, if he would agree not to share it with the Society. My mom gave me a sideways glance, noticing me playing with my pizza slice, so I rolled and demolished it, deciding that Brian and the others would have to tackle me to keep me silent. Except about the stone. That still seemed to be something we wouldn’t want the Society to know about. They might demand to remove it, and failing that, take the whole hand. I shuddered.
Mom rubbed my shoulder. “You all right, honey?”
“Long couple of days.” I took a deep breath. “Carter, what do you know about ghosts? Or, better yet, people who are neither here nor there.”
He choked on his last bite, coughed heartily a few times, and took a big swig of his tea. “What?”
“The hole in the floor?”
He cleared his throat and nodded.
“There’s a cellar under half the house we didn’t know was there.”
“That is interesting.”
“It is. Because a ghost came with it, and that ghost is my dad.”
He wiped his hands off and sat back, crossing his arms. “I should get CSU out here. Did you find remains of any kind?”
“No. And he says he isn’t dead. Exactly. So there’s nothing to investigate because there’s no evidence, no body.”
“You spoke to him?” The corner of one hazel eye twitched.
“Yes.”
“But you don’t think he’s dead?”
I shook my head. “He seems to be in between, caught. Maybe he can come back, maybe we have to send him on. I don’t know. I’m not asking the Society to help, just you. I think,” and I twisted my fingers together. “I think bringing the Society in might just cause more trouble.”
“You’d be right!” Steptoe insisted. Brian stopped him from saying anything else by putting a hand on his arm, watching me alertly.
“Did he know what happened? Or where? Or who?”
“Not that he said. He’s weak, so it’s not like I can interrogate him for half the day or something.”
That made Carter wince. I added quickly, “Not that I think you work like that.”
A grateful expression flashed across his face so quickly I almost wondered if I’d imagined it. It hit me that he cared what I thought. He unfolded from his chair and dropped his napkin to the table. “Let me go home. Think about it. Do a little discreet studying. I’ll see what I can figure out.”
“Great!” I walked him to the door while behind us I could hear Steptoe angrily muttering to Brian, with Hiram giving off soothing, low tones of placation.
Carter turned on the porch step. I stood just inside and a moment came I didn’t want to resist, so I didn’t. I leaned forward slightly and cupped my right hand along the side of his face. I could feel bristles that needed shaving, and the measured drumbeat of his pulse, and the glow of his skin. His bone structure felt chiseled. His eyes widened. His personal aroma, that scent of pine and leather and something else I couldn’t identify, wrapped around me.
More than that. It wasn’t the proper hand, but the maelstrom stone awoke sharply. It knew him, sensed a deep and dark core buried inside him, and woke something in me to answer. We’d both seen things we shouldn’t have. Knew things beyond mortal knowledge. Could reach for and use power in any, and all, of its forms. We could pull in whatever strength we needed from whatever source, and mold it to our command. Together. Without remorse or hesitation. We could be a force worth reckoning with, a force that could shape our world.
I dropped my hand suddenly, shaken.
“What was that?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Tessa, what have they done to you?”
“Nothing.” True. I’d done it to myself. I wasn’t lying to him, exactly.
“You don’t get power from nothing.”
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“I can’t do that. Not if anything threatens you.”
He stood, tall as one of the stately alder trees on the boulevard.
Slowly, I turned my left hand over and showed him the maelstrom stone.